Jenkins defines his “crucible era” as starting around 250 BCE - about 80 years before the Maccabean revolt in Judea against the Seleucid Greeks - and ending in 50 BCE. He has a thesis to promote; that the characteristics of today’s Judaism, Christianity and Islam were all forged during that period. This post-Biblical period was a time of changing beliefs among the Jews of Judea and the Diaspora - about the nature of God, reward and punishment, life after death, and the ability of mortals to influence their own future. The literary sources that the author draws on are the later books of the Hebrew bible, such as Proverbs and Daniel, and the many books popularly known as the Apocrypha, books which didn’t make the cut into the Jewish canon, but which were frequently preserved as part of the Christian Bible.

One of the main causes of change in beliefs was the destruction of the Temple in 586 BCE and the subsequent Babylonian exile. The pre-exilic prophets, such as Isaiah and Jeremiah, attributed Israel's woes to the failure of the nation to keep to its part of the Sinai Covenant and recalled the Torah's warning that the sins of the fathers would be visited on the children. In contrast, Ezekiel, the prophet of the exile, already rejects the idea of children paying for the previous generations' sins, and emphasizes that everyone will enjoy the rewards of their own good actions. Subsequently, however, with the nation of Israel in a subject status, and other nations apparently enjoying the blessings of success despite their worship of idols and other gods, questions naturally arose. Either you had to give up trying to understand the ways of God - which is essentially the message of the Book of Job, written during this period; or, you had to look beyond the present life, to a future life where you would be justly rewarded. For the first time, the idea of a life after death - completely absent from most of the Torah and only mentioned specifically in the Book of Daniel - starts to appear. This led naturally to the concept of martyrdom (Daniel again) whereby a sacrifice for your beliefs in this life will lead to even greater rewards in that to come.

Greater contact with other peoples and their belief systems - the Hellenistic culture imported by Alexander the Great and his successors, and the Zoroastrian influence from Persia - raised other questions. How universal was Israel's God? If the God of the Hebrew Bible was just the tribal divinity of the Hebrews alongside all the other nations' gods - who or what was the supreme being who presided over everything? Was God responsible for the existence of both good and evil in the world; or was the latter to be laid at someone else's door? Answers to these questions led to vivid speculation about whole cohorts of other celestial beings. Angels - who in the Bible stories appear just as messengers and agents of God - start to take on the role of powers in their own right. Each nation was seen as having its own guardian angel - Michael was the guardian of Israel; and one - the "fallen" angel, who was later promoted to the status of "anti-God" - was the one responsible for the creation and promotion of evil in the world.

What we now know as the books of the Hebrew bible had not yet been compiled into a single authoritative work. In this fluid absence of an official "canon", there developed, alongside the older Biblical books, a vast new literature of visions and prophecies, much of it apocalyptic, and often written in the name of a Biblical character; the "Wisdom of Solomon", the "Book of Jubilees", the "Testament of Amram" (Moses' father), and the "Books of Enoch". Enoch was the great grandfather of Noah who, according to the book of Genesis, ascended to heaven without having died. The latter was the most influential of these so-called "pseudo-epigraphia"; so much so, that Jenkins, together with other writers, credits it with giving rise to an "Enochic" variant of Judaism. Another current of beliefs popular among all of the peoples of the region, but with a distinct Judaic variety, was the "Wisdom" literature - what we would probably call philosophy; some of this - such as the Book of Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes - did eventually make its way into the Hebrew canon. Jenkins is keen to show how what were essentially Jewish ideas - many of them subsequently discarded along with their literary sources by Rabbinic Judaism - subsequently surfaced in Christianity - both normative Orthodoxy and the various "heresies" and Gnosticisms. It is an interesting and much more thoroughly argued alternative to other explanations of the development of Christian theology, as the product of Greek philosophy and the Christian Bible. ( )

Jenkins sets out to demonstrate that many of the religious ideas that we take for granted: angels and demons, physical resurrection, punishment in the afterlife, a day of judgement, etc. were products of the political and religious turmoil of the period between 250-50 BCE as the Jewish people were affected by Greek thought, foreign rule and internecine conflicts. Many of the texts that clarify the religious response to these events have only recently been discovered, as in the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or re-evaluated, as in the case of writings regarded as scripture by lesser known sects on the edge of conventional Christianity. The information is complex but the book will be interesting to those interested in religious history. ( )